A child of one's old age is
a hard nut to roast, a blighted bow on the
family tree, a vestigial, unlooked-for thing. Never beautiful, bright,
or
energetic as the offspring of one's youth, here, nevertheless, it is and
must be tended and informed. You do your best. Perhaps your added
years will make you a wiser parent. All those books and journeys and
loves, failures and triumphs may be of use to him. Should be. But
how
to tell it. You feel impotent to impart any syllable of it. So you fuss
along until one day he demands of you what you knew he would.

TRUTH: Do not make the modern
mistake, I say, of seeking truth from
science or scientists. Heed them, for they have sharp minds, but what
they have to offer are FACTS, not truths. Even about FACTS, they can
be wrong, but TRUTH is simply not in their gift. For TRUTHs, do as the
ancients, harken to the poets and philosophers. To the human animal,
TRUTH is a subjective construct, best left to those who can extract
from
FACTS the necessary human signification, and then debate it endlessly,
as subjective creatures are meant to do... for TRUTH is ever changing.
Never close your mind on the FACTS of science; what is known is too
small for human souls that turn always from the known to the mysterious.

MEANING and MYSTERY: Science
has ransacked its vast storehouse
of FACTS from top to bottom and is strangely proud to say it finds no
MEANING whatsoever. To science, life is short and meaningless. Yet if
it have no length, life has great breadth and depth, verging on the infinite,
bounded only by imagination. A life of infinite breadth and depth finally
confronts MYSTERY, where, like a perpetual star fueled by its own heart,
it burns and burns. MEANINGs are created in the heart of MYSTERY,
boiling to the surface and subsiding through time. As the only animal
confronting MYSTERY, MEANINGs are what make us human. The heart
of MYSTERY is the human heart.

TIME and LOVE: Time is a feature
of the physical universe thoroughly
measured by science. If all points in the universe coexist, all points
in
time coexist too, past and future mere appearances as we pass through
time. Time does not pass us. Time is the container, the envelope of the
universe, a FACT of science. Science cannot locate or measure the human
soul, however, or its envelope Love, yet few deny their existence.
Things
spiritual elude and confound science. Which then is larger, soul or universe?
"Above the earth is stretched the sky, no higher than the soul is
high," says
Edna Millay. Soul and universe are coextensive. And more to this, Hindu
wisdom says Tat Twam Asi, "Thou art That." Soul and universe,
subject
and object, Self and Other, spiritual and physical are ONE. But science
sees
only half.

These things I told him, but
he was silent, unable to use them, metaphor,
meter, or rhyme, in the music of his own soul. Still too young, I guessed,
or... sudden thought... was he in fact too old. Either way his parade
is
passing. It's his time now. Here he is.